Peter Cookson

Peter Cookson (May 8, 1913 – January 6, 1990) was an American stage, film, and television actor whose Broadway career spanned from 1947 to 1957. Born on a houseboat on the Willamette River in Milwaukie, Oregon, he was the son of Gerald Cookson, a career British Army officer, and Helen Willis, a nurse. He trained at the Pasadena Playhouse on a scholarship and went on to become a founding member of The Actors Studio.

Cookson made his Broadway debut in 1947, earning a Theatre World Award that year. His first major stage credit was The Heiress, an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, in which he appeared opposite Beatrice Straight. He subsequently appeared in Message for Margaret and The Little Blue Light before taking on what became his most celebrated stage role: the lovestruck judge in Cole Porter's 1953 musical Can-Can. In that production, Cookson introduced the song "It's All Right With Me." His New York Times obituary noted that he had expressed surprise at being cast in the role, having not sung before an audience since high school. His Broadway work also extended to producing; in 1950 he produced The Innocents, starring Beatrice Straight.

Prior to his Broadway prominence, Cookson appeared in several feature films during the 1940s, including G. I. Honeymoon (1945) and Fear (1946). He transitioned exclusively to television work during the following decade. Beyond performing, Cookson was also a writer, authoring the novel Henderson's Head (1973), the play Million Rosebuds (1978), written with the New Dramatists, and the play Unique Species (1984). He also wrote a comedy play titled Pigeons, which he later adapted into a script in 1986.

In 1937, Cookson married Maureen Gray, with whom he had two children, Peter Cookson Jr. and Jane Copland. The couple divorced in 1948. That same year, while appearing in The Heiress on Broadway, he met Beatrice Straight, the daughter of Dorothy Payne Whitney and Willard Dickerman Straight, an investment banker and diplomat, whose stepfather was Leonard Knight Elmhirst. Cookson and Straight married in 1949 and had two children together: Gary Cookson, an actor, and Tony Cookson, writer and director of And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird (1991). Both Cookson and Straight were founding members of The Actors Studio.

Cookson died on January 6, 1990, of bone cancer at his home in Southfield, Massachusetts. Beatrice Straight died in 2001 from pneumonia in Northridge, Los Angeles, at the age of eighty-six.